A Summerful of Labor Days

By MICHELE INGRASSIA

Published: July 23, 2006

AT 8:30 a.m. on a sultry summer Sunday, when many people haven't even rubbed the sand from their eyes, Mike Batnick and Jordan Siegman have already swept a mountain of it out of Lee Rothlein's cabana at the Sunny Atlantic Beach Club. They've set up plastic tables and chairs so that Mr. Rothlein and his cabana-mates can breakfast alfresco. They've snapped open a set of lounge chairs cabana-side. And they've hauled another load down to the shore, where they're sweating in the early July murk, trying to bury Mr. Rothlein's plastic umbrella-holders in the sand.

''They're impossible to get in,'' says Mr. Batnick, 21, wrestling with the propeller-bottomed umbrella gripper. ''But last year, when we first met Lee, the first thing he said was, 'Rule No. 1: My umbrellas must never touch the ground.' ''

''Lee's a really nice guy, but he wants what he wants,'' says Mr. Siegman, 20, who could easily say the same about the owners of the 14 other cabanas in the oceanfront row he and Mr. Batnick tend to. ''Lee likes to get here early. He likes to be by the water. He likes the sand out of every corner of his cabana. And he likes his umbrellas.''

They forgive him his idiosyncrasies. Come Sunday night, when club members dole out folded-up 10's and 20's, Mr. Batnick says, ''He takes care of us.''

The feeling is mutual: ''This is a minivacation,'' says Mr. Rothlein, a 64-year-old accounting-company executive from Lynbrook. ''I want to be waited on. They bring me food, they bring me coffee, and I tip them well, rain or shine.''

It is a delicate dance of summer, this to-and-fro between cabana dwellers and cabana boys. From Memorial Day to Labor Day, thousands of families descend upon private beach clubs that line the shores of Long Island, New Jersey and Westchester, determined to kick back and have someone cater to their every whim, or at least those whims that revolve around sun, sand and sandwiches. And it is the job of the boys -- and a handful of girls -- to make sure no errant grain of sand, no renegade water wing, no wilted ice cube gets in the way of their bliss.

You can find cabana crews at scattered public and private beaches on the Long Island Sound and the Jersey Shore, ranging from the municipal beach club in Allenhurst, N.J., to the exclusive Westchester Country Club in Rye and the Surf Club in New Rochelle. But the greatest concentration of cabanas remains on the South Shore of Long Island. Their presence, veterans say, harks back to the days before both parents had to work and students had to devote July and August to r?m?illing internships. Back then, the Island was synonymous with the leisure life, and cabana boys kept it humming.

Sunny Atlantic, where units rent from $500 to $7,500 a summer, is typical. It is one of the smallest of the dozen clubs on Nassau's South Shore, with 100 cabanas (about 250 square feet, with two private changing areas, electricity and two showers) and 197 lockers (24 square feet). The cabanas are usually shared by two families, and the lockers by up to four, so the club has one of the highest concentrations of members: about 1,000, which can swell to 1,200 with weekend guests.

TO spend time with the club's 18-member crew -- all but three of whom are male -- is to watch the essence of summer work unfurl, a mix of endless sun, bone-wearying labor and unapologetic servitude.

''I am their slave,'' says Lou Gilliam, a 21-year-old student at the State University of New York at Albany, who is in his third summer at the club and who cheerfully reduces the job to its essentials: ''I do what they say, I make money.'' To be precise, he is paid waiters' wages, $4.20 an hour plus tips, which can top $7,000 a season.

Despite grueling 12-hour days, young people covet the jobs. Howard Taub, the owner of Sunny Atlantic, says he starts getting applications in October for the following summer. Sometimes he chooses boys and girls who grew up summering at the club; always he is looking for hard workers.

''I had a kid drive up in a 500SEL Mercedes and say, 'I want to be a cabana boy,' '' Mr. Taub recalls. ''Someone who's driving a $60,000 car isn't looking to work. He's looking to come to the beach and get a tan.''

Unlike the randy rogues of ''The Flamingo Kid,'' the 1984 Matt Dillon movie that romanticized, well, the romance of a beach club, these boys and girls of summer keep the cabanas buzzing with labor over love. Open the lockers in the morning, fill the coolers with ice, lug lounge chairs 100 yards to the shore, fetch coffee, fetch frozen yogurt, fetch a burger, French fries and a glass of milk -- and, oh, don't forget the straw. Spray for ants. Refill the kiddie pool. Retrieve a wayward 3-year-old. And just as the sun sets, clean up every plastic pail, chair and beach ball from the sand.

''It's hard to explain to people how hard this job is,'' says Mr. Batnick, his head buried under a Texas Longhorns cap. He proudly remembers the 98-degree day last summer when he collapsed from heat stroke -- ''I rested and then did cleanup. I didn't want to leave it all to my partner.'' Then there were the other days, when he'd hauled so many bags of trash that he was ''literally covered in garbage juice.''